nanovivid

CallVantage Dialer 1.3 is released! Here’s the changelog:

• Quicksilver action support.
• Allow passing a number to the script using LaunchBar.
• Growl 0.6 fixes and support.
• Automatic conversion of +XX-number to 011-XX-number for international dialing (thanks to Paul for the request).
• Migrated from saving in text file to saving in a plist (thanks to Jon for the suggestion).
• Added Install and Uninstall scripts.

♫ DJ Rawkus - Audio Differenz

Someone please put it out of its misery. I think they were trying to outdo Lotus Notes in bad UI decisions… and they’ve very nearly succeeded.

♫ William Shatner - It Hasn't Happened Yet

After a lot HTML/CSS/ExpressionEngine/PHP hacking, my boyfriend’s new site design is up. I’m quite happy with how it came out.

ExpressionEngine is a pretty cool system, and Bryan is bugging me about creating a LiveJournal cross-post module. We’ll see if that happens.

At work, I spent all day with my head buried in an Access database, learning way more than I ever wanted to know about the limitations of grouping and sorting in reports and create table queries. I have such a love/hate relationship with programming for Access… on the one hand it’s possible to do some very cool and powerful things, but there are also some insanely stupid walls that I run into. I’ll probably be able to wrap up work on it tomorrow.

Courtney is coming to visit on Friday, which will be fun. I like having people visit. All people should visit me.

♫ The Early November - Dinner At The Money Table (Acoustic)

Time for some more Mac geekery. On friday Growl 0.5 was released. Growl is a unified notification system for OS X that I’ve been using for a while now and it’s very cool. I do have to admit that it’s not the prettiest thing in the world right now, but better display plugins are coming.

Here are some of my favorite uses for Growl:

• Adium supports Growl for buddy signed on/off notifications and such. Follow these instructions to enable it.

• iTunes via Quicksilver. QS can use Growl for its notifications… but there’s currently a little work to get it going. First you have to change QS’s feature mode to Beta, then visit the plugins page from within Quicksilver. Install the Growl and iTunes plugins. Then under Actions, set Notification to use GrowlHelperApp and under iTunes, turn on recent track monitoring and track notifications. I’m using QS for iTunes track changes, so I get a notification whenever a new track comes up. (GrowlTunes does the same thing, but it’s an external program and I always have QS running anyway.)

• Email notification. I use a script instead of GrowlMail because it generates a notification for every message showing the sender and subject, rather than just a notification for each account that gets new mail (you can find a sample script in the Growl download). In Mail, go into Preferences, then Rules. Create a new rule set up like this:

  • If any of the following conditions are met: Every Message

  • Perform the following actions: Run AppleScript path to New Mail Notification.scpt

• Last but not least, I have to pimp my CallVantage dialer, which will generate a Growl notification when dialing a number.

♫ Magnolia - It’s All Vain (Sticky’s Refix)

I discovered NewsFire today and it’s already kicked NetNewsWire off my dock. NewsFire’s minimalist interface is full of lickable goodness and simplicity. The biggest lack I’m currently feeling is some sort of badge on the icon indicating the number of unread items, but hopefully that will come in time. It’ll be interesting to see how NewsFire competes with NetNewsWire 2.0 once that is out. For now though, NewsFire is the newsreader for me.

♫ Ben Gibbard - A Lack Of Color (Live Acoustic)

CallVantage Dialer has been updated again. Here’s the changelog:

• CallVantage number and password are now stored in a preference file. No more opening the script and manually entering information.
• Displays a Growl notification while the number is being dialed if Growl is installed.

</geekout>

♫ Dntel - Don't Get Your Hopes Up

CallVantage Dialer has been updated. It now uses cURL instead of the Safari scripting hacks that were previously used. This means that it now is completely invisible and transparent to the user. Yay shell scripting!

♫ Shiny Toy Guns - Le Disko

Today, I released a little project I’ve been working on for a bit now. CallVantage Dialer is an AppleScript that automates the process of dialing numbers for AT&T CallVantage using Safari and the CallVantage website.

Thanks to Bryan for testing and offering suggestions.

I also posted the script to MacUpdate.

In other news, the site design has been updated to 1.2. I’ve shuffled the menus to create a new “projects” menu. Also, if you’re using a non-IE browser, you’ll find the menus more usable as they now have a buffer zone so they don’t disappear the instant you move your mouse off them.

♫ Freiland - Hot Love (Justus Köhncke feat. Meloboy Mix)

Some (very good) news in the arena of OS X P2P — there are now native, easy to use Soulseek and eDonkey clients. Soulseek support comes in the form of Nicotine.app, which uses X11, so it looks a bit like ass, but works great (thanks to BoingBoing for pointing this out). eDonkey just released their 1.0 beta today, so if you like the Digital Archive Project grab it and download those MSTs.

One note to anyone who tries Nicotine: be patient the first time you launch it. On the first run it may take a while to show anything other than a blank window. However, subsequent runs will be speedy.

♫ Scissor Sisters - Take Me Out

Other than work and having good conversations with cool people, not too much has been happening this week. (Heh, that’s a lie, there’s a lot of stuff going on, just not stuff I can talk about here… I really need to set up some sort of privacy stuff on nv.c). To make up for the lack of me content, I’ll point you to some other content.

Kyrce (by way of Courtney) pointed out an article on Homestar Runner. It’s largely an introduction to the site but it does have some interesting facts about the Brothers Chaps. In case you missed it back toward the beginning of the year, here’s another good article.

I ran across TAZL Design the other day. They have some very nice desktop images. I’m especially a fan of the XEN collection. They need higher resolutions though.

While I was listening to Music One recently, they played a mix of The Supermen Lovers song Starlight. I first heard that song in Ireland, and I loved it. I went and checked out the Lovers’ website and it’s crazy cool. You have to beat the levels of a space invaders type game to access the content. After getting up to level 4, I was disappointed to find that level 5 just says "coming soon." Oh well. I really want to get their cds though… awesome French disco house.

In Mac software news, Konfabulator 1.5 was released today. There’s a sweet new widget called iChat Bezel that does buddy activity popups. For example, when a buddy comes online, a notice comes up the says "So-and-So is available." Unfortunately, the widget was missing a lot of options… so I added a bunch to it. :-) Here’s the changelog so far:

• Choose which alerts to display. Show only "Available" or only "Away" and "Offline" - it’s your choice!
• Choose between dark or light background. I felt like the original background for the widget was too light. So I made it darker. You can still use the light one if you want though.
• Specify whether or not to show status text. Some peoples’ away messages can be really freaking long, and this makes iChat Bezel be Big McLarge Huge. Now you can choose to only see "Available" status text, only "Away," both, or neither.

If those sound good to you, download iChat Bezel Enhanced. Please give feedback at the Konfab forum thread. (Or I guess you can use the contact form, but I’d rather it be on the thread).

Playing around with that widget has just been too much fun. :-)

♫ BT - Somnambulist